


In Persica Veritas

by strix_alba



Category: Pushing Daisies
Genre: Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-22 10:44:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/608967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strix_alba/pseuds/strix_alba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Olive Snook discovers Clark Kent's secret identity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Persica Veritas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [significantowl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/significantowl/gifts).



The time was seven forty-one in the evening, and the Pie Hole had been emptied of customers for the night. Three people remained, seated at a booth which looked out onto the snowy street. The table between them was occupied by two pies and an assortment of moldy fruit whose odor somewhat counteracted the pies’ gentle aroma.

Olive Snook swallowed a generous forkful of cherry rhubarb pie. She fixed her gaze on the Piemaker like a child awaiting candy, in part to maintain the illusion of a sanitary and corpse-free eating environment, and licked the fork until not a trace of fruit or crust remained. “So,” she said, “what’s the scoop? You said you had something to tell me, which I’m assuming in this case means the thing that you and Chuck and Emerson have been whispering about behind my back for the last two years.” The Piemaker and the girl named Chuck looked stricken, and Olive sighed. “No I’m not going say, ‘it’s fine, feel free to leave me out of your secret circle of secrecy’. I am _over that_.” She punctuated the last with a triumphant flick of her fork.

The Piemaker smiled at her, though Olive thought it resembled a pained grimace. “I guess I deserve that. Actually, come to think of it, I definitely deserved that. You’ve been a good friend, Olive, to all of us.” Olive took a moment to preen, and to make sure that her heart hadn’t lurched a little in disappointment at the word ‘friend’. “Friends trust each other, and I do trust you — for the most part — except for the fact that you have a history of secret-keeping-related breakdowns and I don’t want you to have to join a convent again because I’d miss you, and I’d have to pretend to be a priest every time I wanted to see you, —“

Chuck coughed into her hand. Ned took a deep breath and clasped his hands. “Sorry.” He looked into Olive’s eyes and opened his mouth. Olive prepared herself for the bomb, nerves fluttering with excitement. This was it. This was The Moment, the moment she had been waiting for ever since she had first become an accomplice in the charade of Charlotte Charles’ death. She fortified herself with another bite of pie.

Ned sat back, shoulders slumped, gazing at the pear pie in front of Chuck. “I don’t know where to start,” he admitted. “I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone. Usually — which here means ‘when Emerson and Chuck found out’ — it’s a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

“Tell anyone what? Oh my god, are you a serial killer?” Olive’s mouth dropped open; she quickly realized her error, as half-chewed cherry-rhubarb filling fell over her bottom lip. She wiped it away before anyone at the table could notice. The attempt failed, however, as both of her friends were at that very moment staring at her in various degrees of shock and confusion.

Chuck leaned in to whisper in Olive’s ear. “Watch this,” she said. “Ned, catch!” She picked up one of the moldy peaches from the table, and tossed it at the Piemaker. He jumped, and brought his hands in close to his chest to cradle the rotten fruit. Olive winced, anticipating the splat it would make as it hit his hands.

It did not come. Instead, the Piemaker placed a ripe, unblemished peach on the table in front of Olive with a weak smile. “I can bring dead things back to life,” he said, in the tone of one confessing to having a mad first wife locked in the attic.

Olive stared at the peach. Then she stared at the Ned, who watched her with a sheepish expression on his face. Her mind raced, jumping from one memory to the next and stringing connections between them like Christmas lights until she was ablaze with revelation. The storeroom full of moldy fruit! The fact that she was never allowed in the mortuary while he and Emerson looked for clues! The fact that a baker worked with a private investigator in the first place! And Chuck! Faked her death indeed. Ha! Olive had a thousand things to say — a thousand questions to ask — so many things, in fact, that the throng of them short-circuited her powers of speech. With no other recourse, she pointed at the peach in front of her and squeaked. Ned bit his lip. She pointed at the peach, and Ned, and then between Chuck and the peach, and then Ned and Chuck, and finally, the peach and the pies.

“I tried to tell you, but you didn’t believe me. Admittedly, it wasn’t under the best of circumstances, and I probably could have tried harder,” said Chuck.

Olive latched onto her words like a life buoy, letting them guide her out of her own inner turmoil. She threw up her hands. “You’re a peach!”

Chuck tilted her head. “What?”

“You’re a peach! He — you were murdered. You were dead, you died.” Olive pointed at Chuck — sweet, selfish, secretive Chuck — though possibly not quite as selfish as Olive had given her credit for — oh, this was confusing. This was going to take some time. “You didn’t fake your death, you _were_ dead, and then Prince Charming over here came and woke you up, and of course, _of course_. It all makes sense!” Olive gasped and clutched the sides of her head. 

Ned raised his eyebrows. “It does?”

Olive thought about what she had just said. “No.” She folded her hands on the table and leaned towards the Piemaker. “If you’re talking to these murder victims, why don’t you just wake ‘em up and keep them that way? Seems like a lot less effort to me.”

Ned glanced at Chuck, who gave him a sappy smile that Olive now understood was not just an ‘I love you’ smile, but a ‘gave me a literal second chance at life’ smile. Olive really hadn't stood a chance, she realized that now. It only stung a little bit.

The Piemaker reached out and touched the peach in front of Olive again. Before her eyes, it withered away, banishing the last niggling doubt in the back of her mind that this was all some kind of elaborate hoax to hide an even deeper, darker secret. “I can’t. If I don’t re-dead them again, then someone else dies in their place. And if I touch them, that’s it.” His face fell, and as his gaze moved from Olive to Chuck, another piece of the puzzle fell into place.

“So that’s your ‘allergy’, huh?” Olive said to Chuck.

“Digby’s too,” added Ned.

Chuck nodded. Olive looked at the moldy fruit in front of her, applied the metaphor to Chuck, and shuddered. For a few seconds, she pitied her friends. Able to live together, but never touch; never feel the other’s skin against their own, never able to kiss, never able to spontaneously bump into each other while going over the finer points of creating lifelike musculature for a taxidermied squirrel. “That’s so sad,” Olive murmured, in a burst of empathy that surprised even her. It faded when she remembered that, tragic though their love might be, it had been the principle cause of her own distress for many a month. “Of course, if you’d told me sooner, it would probably have prevented a lot of heartbreak and disappointment over on my end, but hey, water under the bridge, am I right?” She sliced off another bite of pie with her fork, and shoveled it into her mouth, grinning manically.

Chuck, however, surprised Olive by taking her hand. Across the table, the Piemaker laid his fingers across the back of Olive’s other wrist. “We’re sorry,” said Chuck.

"Is there anything we can do ... to make it up to you?" Ned asked.

In spite of Olive’s frustration, she found herself touched by her friends’ contrition. She gripped their hands, and would have made a conciliatory statement right then and there, but was prevented by a mouth full of food. The delay gave her time to think more closely about Ned’s offer, and by the time she was able to speak once more, she knew what she wanted. “I want Chuck to go tell Lily and Vivian that you’re still alive. At this point I don’t think the shock will kill them, and they deserve the truth just as much as I do.”

Chuck and the Piemaker looked at each other. “We were going to do that tomorrow morning,” said Ned. “We wanted to tell you first.”

Olive felt a little cheated of her moment of selflessness, but she pushed it aside and plowed on. It seemed as though a small, previously unacknowledged knot of jealousy in her stomach was being picked apart with every word of truth out of the mouths of her friends, and she was eager to capitalize on the feeling. She extracted her hands from those of her friends, and clasped them in front of her. “All right then. I want to know everything that you’ve been hiding from me.”

Ned raised his eyebrows, looking a little ill. “Everything?”

Olive nodded. “You can start by telling me what really happened to Dwight Dixon,” she said, “and then you can go back to the beginning and fill me in from there. I’m all ears.”

The man who could raise the dead and the girl he had brought back to life smiled at Olive Snook. “I’ll get another pie,” he said.


End file.
